I'm an author and the co-founder of Mind Gym, a corporate learning consultancy that transforms the way people think, act and behave at work and at home. My next book, Mind Gym: Achieve More by Thinking Differently will be out on September 9, 2014. Similar to this column, the book will give readers actionable ways, based on years of research, to change their way of thinking to achieve more, live longer and build better relationships.

An enthusiastic entrepreneur waxes lyrical about the strengths, opportunities and USPs of their latest invention, to be met with glazed looks and an interrogation. Few secure the vital investment. No matter how great an idea, the pitch makes or breaks it. If a would-be investor doesn’t believe in the potential, you’ve got no chance. Well, good news: psychologists have unearthed a technique which could transform pitches everywhere. It’s called experience taking.

From Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ to Jobs’ ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’, storytelling to build belief is nothing new. Experience taking goes further. In a traditional story, listeners might sympathize with or understand a character’s perspective. Experience taking involves actually becoming the main character. You lose your own identity and take on the character’s thoughts, emotions, judgments and behaviors. The theory goes that you then keep some of those characteristics yourself.

Geoff Kaufman and Lisa Libby ran a series of experiments to investigate the causes and consequences of experience taking. The results were a fascinating insight into how best to influence beliefs and behaviors using stories.

Principle 1: Reduce your investor’s self-awareness

Experience taking involves casting aside your own identity and taking on the traits of the character in the story. So the researchers hypothesised that we’re more likely to engage in experience taking if we’re less aware of ourselves. That’s exactly what they found:

The researchers wanted to see if they could manipulate the participants’ responses about their personality. So, the participants read a story about an introverted college student, and then answered questions about their their own levels of introversion.

The researchers then manipulated the participants’ levels of self-awareness. First by asking people to answer as a college student in general. This reduced their focus on themselves as individual. When asked about their own personality, these participants scored higher on introversion, which was explained by their higher levels of experience taking.

The second experiment did the opposite. Half of the participants read the story while looking in a mirror – a process designed to make them highly self-aware. As predicted, these participants reported less experience taking and were less likely to take on the character’s personality characteristics.

So, lesson one: reduce your would-be investor’s self-awareness. Hold the pitch on neutral territory, keep their company name and logo out of sight and avoid mirrors at all costs. Make them forget themselves so they take on the main character’s traits (who, presumably, thinks your product is brilliant and worthy of investment).

Principle 2: Write in the first person and make your main character similar to your investors

Kaufman and Libby’s next experiment looked at the characteristics of the story itself. They found that stories written in the first person increased experience taking and influenced behavior; but only if the main character was similar to the reader.

Principle 3: If your main character is different to your investor, don’t let them know until it’s too late

What if the nature of your idea appeals to a very different demographic? Never fear. Kaufman and Libby found a way to make readers see the world through the eyes of a character who was different to them; by not revealing that fact until it was too late:

When heterosexual participants found out two-thirds of the way through a story that the main character was homosexual, they reported more experience taking, more favourable attitudes towards homosexuals and less stereotypical beliefs, compared with readers who found out in the first paragraph. This held true for Caucasian participants who found out late in a story that the main character was African-American: the delayed revelation meant the readers had time for more experience taking, so they later showed less racist beliefs and were more likely to interpret the character’s behavior positively.

Apparently, when the conditions are right, stories can transform people’s beliefs and behaviors – so long as the reader can blur the line between themselves and the main character. Forget catchy jingles or industrious number crunching; the key to entrepreneurial success could lie in who you make your audience become.

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